Hypothetically – The Future of Twitter

While working on a project for another client, examining native apps vs HTML5/webapps, I started thinking about the possible future of Twitter. Since the birth of twitter on March 21st, 2006, we’ve seen a whole industry develop to support it. Hootsuite, tweetdeck, tweetstats, and a million other sites, solely created to improve the twitter experience. While not publicly traded (and not expected to be in the near future) the estimated value of Twitter sits between $4 billion and $7 billion. Granted, as a smart investor I know recently pointed out – just because someone on the internet says that a company is worth something, doesn’t mean it actually is. If and when twitter IPOs, I guess we’ll know the true value of the company, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that they can afford to drink whatever they want at Starbucks for the foreseeable future.

You can see twitter on pretty much every website (ok, websites that are updated regularly), if your business does anything online, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that your twitter handle is on your business card. Fox has started adding a hashtag to your favourite shows, and we’ve already seen twitter aid in social reform this year.

IMHO, one of the most important things that Facebook has done is to regularly evolve. Sure, people might get a bit upset every time the interface changes, but the site improves with each iteration. How long will it be before we have a physical “like” button in the real world businesses we visit? Well, maybe not that far away.

So – what is the future of twitter?

So what does Twitter need to do for its evolutionary process? Where do you want it to go, and what does it need to do to stay on top of the game?